paper

Towards Modelling AR Sco: Calibration -- Reproducing High-Energy Pulsar Emission and Testing Convergence to Aristotelian Electrodynamics

arXiv:2506.18917 · doi:10.1093/mnras/staf958

Abstract

In recent years, kinetic simulations have been crucial to further our understanding of pulsar electrodynamics. Yet, due to the large-scale separation between the gyro-period vs the stellar rotation period, resolving the particle gyration has been computationally unfeasible for realistic pulsar parameters. The main aim of this work is comparing our gyro-phase-resolved model with a gyro-centric pulsar model, where our model solves the general equations of motion with included radiation reaction using a higher-order numerical solver with adaptive time steps. Specifically, we aim to (i) reproduce a pulsar's high-energy emission maps, namely one with the surface -field strength of Vela, and spectra produced by an independent gyro-centric pulsar emission model; (ii) test convergence of these results to the radiation-reaction limit of Aristotelian Electrodynamics. (iii) Additionally, we identify the effect that a large -field has on the trajectories and radiation calculations. We find that we can reproduce the curvature radiation emission maps and spectra well, using field strengths of the Vela pulsar and injecting our particles at a higher altitude in the magnetosphere. Using sufficiently large -fields, our numeric results converge to the analytic radiation-reaction limit trajectories. Additionally, we illustrate the importance of accounting for the -drift in the particle trajectories and radiation calculations, validating the Harding and collaborators' model approach. Lastly, we found that our model deals very well with the high-radiation-reaction and high-field regimes present in pulsars.

arXiv comment24 pages, 21 figures Follow up to methods paper

References in corpus (43)